The Train

January 28, 2018

One day I was thinking about what I had seen on the news, and I said to myself, geez, you can take the train to absolutely anywhere and find corruption and suffering. At that moment The Train began to take shape with the first line of the Chorus. Of course, you can also find good people on the train to anywhere, but that’s a song for another day. The story unfolds in the verses as the speaker reflects on his failure to help others, a failure that will, in the end, contribute to his own demise. The bridge and the chorus are not really a commentary on the power of prayer, but a commentary on the speaker’s failures to engage in even the smallest of acts to help others. In the Chorus the speaker finally admits that something must be done to remedy what he sees on The Train, but even so, he is still only ready to acknowledge the problem with a prayer. We do not know at that point whether or not the speaker has been motivated to act, and that part of the story is left to the imagination of the listener. I wanted the whistle in the Bridge to be march like in order to create a sense of solidarity much like what might beexperienced with people in the pursuit of a common idea or with people moving along together in a train. At the end, we really wanted to create the energy and speed of a locomotive, so Don opted to use a Cry Baby for the lead guitar. Unlike the other 4 songs released on Crows, The Train makes less of a declarative statement and assumes a more questioning tone.